Wednesday, August 30, 2006

I just thought about the latest developments in hardware and realised that the x86 arch is dying, not due to lack of support, but one of these days it will be impossible to by a 32-bit CPU, everyone and their uncles are moving over to 64-bit.

Now here's the problem.We know that there has been great strides on the x86_64 terain the pst couple of years, but this post got me a bit worried.QUOTE

blubbDeveloper

Currently, it is nearly impossible to have a pure stable system with Gentoo/AMD64. I think everybody who has ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=amd64 in his make.conf also has a rather large list of packages in /etc/portage/packages.keywords. To adress this issue, we need either a massive improvement in amount of menpower or a list of packages we can to focus on. If you run a stable system and you're interested in helping...

Currently, it is nearly impossible to have a pure stable system with Gentoo/AMD64.

The reason I bring this up is because I wanted to try amd64 again after quite a while (I last tried it over a year ago) but this has totally put me off. I want a system that works, I need mulitimedia apps (recording and editing video and audio) to be stable and 100% functional and I think for this reason I'm staying with x86 for the time being.

Now, are the Linux devs missing the boat here? Shouldn't they be scrambling to get the x86_64 as stable as soon as possible? Intel and AMD are never going back to 32-bit and you don't get 32-bit CPU's for AMD anymore at all (I think the Sempron is also a 64-bit CPU not so?) and it would seem a waste to spend all your manpower on projects that are going to be obsolete in about a years time.

I guess all I'm saying is that I'm a bit worried that they are focusing their efforts on the wrong projects atm.